


We Just Need A Taste of Who We Are

by Wingheart



Series: Dragon Madeline AU [1]
Category: Celeste (Video Game)
Genre: AU where dragons exist and Maddy is one, Alternate Universe - Dragons, Canon typical anxiety, Gen, Implied/Referenced Disordered Eating, Internalized Speciesism, a bunch of connected snippets from ch1 to some time after the Epilogue, and i have no clue how to tag it, canon typical depressed madeline, chapter titles subject to change, don't leave Badeline unattended in a kitchen, dragons are default dragon form but can take human or inbetween forms, if you're reading this on an app like fanfic pocket archive you are being scammed, maybe don't leave Badeline ATTENDED in a kitchen, this is my first multichapter fic, title is from Thousand Foot Krutch's song Be Somebody
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2019-10-09
Packaged: 2020-11-28 01:48:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20958455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wingheart/pseuds/Wingheart
Summary: An alternate universe where Madeline is a dragon, andhatesit, and the story of how she came to terms with it.If you are reading this on an app like Fanfiction Pocket Archive, you are being scammed. Apps likes Fanfiction Pocket Archive are scraping AO3 to steal content from authors' accounts and are illegally profiting off of authors' work by having ads and subscription options. You can perfectly legally use AO3 for free and download work on AO3 for free without those apps. AO3 is also ad free. Those apps are a scam and are exploiting content creators.





	1. lately i've been, i've been losing sleep (Ch1-3 of Celeste)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title is from One Republic's Counting Stars!

Madeline bounced slightly from foot to foot, staring up at the mountain looming before her. Somewhere, there echoed the distant crash of falling icicles on metal.. The loud noise worsened her perpetual headache, making the base of her ears sting and her human form slightly harder to hold. 

Scratching at the perpetually itchy spot on her chin, she contemplated the climb ahead of her. She was already tired, and she was only partway through the city. On the other hand, her winter gloves had already proven useful, so at least she knew she hadn’t been greedy buying them. (_Everyone_ knew dragons were greedy. Madeline fought against it as hard as she could, but she sometimes found herself buying something she didn’t strictly _need_ anyways; she always gave it away as soon as she could push herself to, but she’d prefer if she never brought them in the first place.)

For a moment she wondered if this was a good idea. Maybe she should’ve just stayed home. The thought brought with it a whole tangled mess of unpleasant feelings. Going home before she’d finished this climb _was not an option._

She took a deep breath, resettled her pack and jacket (she wasn’t sure how she was stretching out her clothes, but they were definitely looser than when she brought them), scratched at her chin again, and went back to climbing.

______________________________________

Madeline leapt out of the strange star jelly blob and hit the musty, greenish brick wall with a dull _thump_, raising a cloud of dust.

Not for the first time, she regretted figuring out she could jump out of the space jelly. The pleasant jolt of impact was not worth having to cough and sputter. 

It was strangely quiet, here; even the sound of the wind outside was muted. Madeline was abruptly nervous. She forced it down- it was just a quiet room, what right did she have to be _scared_?

She focused on her breathing for a moment, then dashed up through the hole in the ceiling to the room above. 

It turned out to contain a long-dead campfire, complete with a pot on it. Slumped beside it was a skeleton- probably a human skeleton- and what _looked_ like a freshly-dead dragon, slumped on opposite sides of the long-dead fire.

That was _not_ what Madeline had needed to see, even with all the other bones she’d seen in cages around the mysterious castle. Madeline wasn’t sure what was worse: that the dragon appeared to be intact, while its...friend(?) had rotted away to just a skeleton, or that it was the first time she’d ever seen a fully-dragon-form dragon outside of a mirror, and despite _everything_ she had to momentarily fight the absurd urge to touch the corpse, or that the dragon appeared to look similar to her own dragon form- two legs, two leathery wings with three-fingered hands, feathery mane, short muzzle, same horn shape on the pronged, blunt-ended, antlerlike horns on top of their head and with chinspikes only a little different from hers- and so it was horribly easy to imagine herself in its place. The main difference was that the corpse was an incredibly pale lavender and purple to Madeline’s white and red. It was even wearing snow pants and a puffer jacket, like herself, although in a different shape and colour.

After what felt like far too long, staring in sick, fascinated horror at the bodies, Madeline spun around and began trying to plan her route for leaving the room. There was one of the space jelly blocks sectioning the room into two halves, and she’d have to dash through. 

...Turning away had made her feel no less nauseous.

Abruptly, Madeline was hit with a wave of dizziness, and from somewhere behind her, a voice rang out.

“_Madeline, darling, slow down._” 

Turning cautiously, Madeline saw nobody there, only the two bodies. 

“Who said that?”

To her surprise, the dragon that she’d assumed was dead lifted its head just enough to be noticable. A little of the omnipresent dust had settled on its horns and feathery mane.

The dizziness and sick feeling lessened slightly, but didn’t clear up entirely, as the dragon claimed to be merely a concerned observer.

The other dragon shook itself- Madeline ignored the urge to ask to touch it- and leapt into the air without even a single wingbeat, transforming as it did into a humanoid shape Madeline had seen before.

Less than an hour ago, in fact, in the mirror.

She still found herself asking if her partially-transformed doppelganger was _her_, though.

“I’m _part_ of you,” she said, smiling smugly. 

“Oh, the awful, monstrous, _dragon_ part? I _wondered_ why you looked so creepy.”

The personification of Madeline’s draconicness looked like she was about to cry, for a moment, before her face hardened into anger. Madeline counted that as a victory, despite the sudden tightness in her throat.

“This...This is just _what I look like,_ okay? It’s what I am. You can’t get rid of me. Deal with it.”

Madeline almost laughed. “I’ve been human for _over three years_ now, so I think you’re losing.” 

Her dragon-self rolled her eyes. “Madeline, sweetie. Just because you’re in human _form_ doesn’t mean you’re _human_. You’re just as dragon as I am, and someday you won’t be able to keep pretending. But, look, forget about it. I can’t tell you what a _relief_ it is to _finally_ get out of your head.”

She paused, then put on what, on a human, Madeline would call a worried face. But she was the personification of Madeline’s dragon nature, so it had to be fake, or a trap. _Everyone_ knew dragons were cruel; Madeline was pretty sure her ability to actually care about people as _people_ was from her two human grandparents, and _very_ sure they were why her family were all generally good people.

“But, look, I’m worried about us,” her reflection said, in a voice that Madeline could almost take for actual concern. “We need a hobby- and more in our life in general- but _this_? You’re gonna get yourself _killed_.”

Madeline rolled her eyes. “I know it sounds crazy, but I _need_ to climb this Mountain.”

Her reflection dropped the pretense of concern and started laughing at her. “You are _many_ things, darling, but you are not a _mountain climber_.”

“Who says I can’t be?” Madeline almost hissed at her, before catching herself and the draconic anger and shoving it aside. She’d been doing so _well_, too.

Her reflection bit back her laughter and pasted the concerned face back on. “I know it’s not your strong suit, especially not now, but be _reasonable_ for once. You have no idea what you’re getting into. You can’t handle this.”

Madeline wasn’t able to bite back all her anger, this time, insisting that that was _why_ she needed to do this- even though it sounded hollow to her own ears. 

The omnipresent headache had been joined by an ache in her fingertips and toes.

“Clearly, you’re not just the evil, dragon part of me, but the lazy and weak part too.”

“I’m none of those. I’m the _pragmatic part._ And I’m _trying_ to be diplomatic here.” Madeline’s reflection stalked forwards, stepping past the long-dead fire and leaning forwards until her face was inches from Madeline’s own. She found herself unable to step backwards, frozen to the spot, but she was so dizzy that she wasn’t sure she’d stay upright if she actually managed to take a step anyways.

“Let’s go home. Together.” Her reflection said, tilting her head. Madeline was somehow sure that she wasn’t referring to her own house.

Madeline managed to find the strength to step back, and the dizziness and sick feeling vanished like dew under a blowtorch. Something shifted in her doppelganger’s face, and ignoring every bit of advice she’d ever read about large predators, Madeline turned tail and _ran_.

_______________________________

Madeline stared at Mr. Oshiro as he begged her to stay in his hotel. She could see a mirror against the wall behind him. It was tilted such that she couldn’t see her reflection anymore, but she had an irrational suspicion that it wasn’t reflecting just the wall.

“Mr. Oshiro, I’ve already been sidetracked too long,” she said, somewhat surprised that she really _didn’t_ want to stay, despite this specific room clearly being actually well-kept and offered to her for half-price, despite how _tired_ she was. (Mr. Oshiro seemed stuck in the past. Had he even adjusted his prices for inflation since the hotel was properly open decades ago?)

She _did_ want the paintings from the walls, though, so she supposed that was where the draconic greed that she _had_ to have was going.

(Everyone knew dragons were greedy.)

Madeline heard faint footsteps, muffled as if through glass. _Oh, no_. She’d thought she’d entirely dreamt her malevolent reflection, but who else could it be? 

There was the crash of breaking glass and her doppelganger leapt out of the mirror, twisting around to float suspended in the air directly opposite Madeline. She was half-transformed- horned, clawed, dragon-eyed, and with distinctly inhuman ears- and Madeline _hated_ her for revealing that she could do that.

“Madeline, sweetie, forget this loser.”

Madeline _hated_ those ‘endearments’. How _dare_ she talk to Madeline as if she actually _cared_? 

Mr. Oshiro sunk to his knees. He seemed devastated by the schoolyard-grade insult. Madeline stared, what was probably draconic aggression warring with the simple fact that there was someone upset and on the floor.

Her reflection continued insulting him, and while Madeline _did_ agree that the resort was clearly in poor shape, watching her reflection flare her wings and puff up, teeth half-bared in a snarl, ears pinned back against her head, to tell him that _nobody would want to stay here_ made her wonder if she was thinking of it too poorly. She was certainly saying it too _cruelly_.

Madeline stepped forward to comfort Mr. Oshiro, and he began to insist that he was busy and that she should leave. Madeline’s reflection appeared to take that as an excuse to further damage his hotel, breaking open a hole in the ceiling.

The worst part, Madeline thought as she clambered out, was probably the fact that she could follow the logic. 

As soon as she got to the roof, her reflection simply _appeared_ out of thin air. Incongruously, this involved purple glitter. Some of it stuck to her reflection’s feathers, even as she insisted that Madeline owed her a favour, and that there was a _list, _as if she’d ever done anything positive for Madeline in her entire existence. 

“Leave me alone. Entirely.” 

Madeline turned and began to run away, but found herself walking alongside her reflection within moments, as she asked a question Madeline had no answer for: “I thought you were _sooooo_ determined to keep climbing, and now all of a sudden, you’re some weirdo’s therapist?”

So she just asked her why she wouldn’t go away. 

“Well, Ma-” was all her reflection could get out, before Mr. Oshiro showed back up.

He had a single question- why had she helped so much, only for ‘her’ to be so cruel, and before Madeline could actually answer, her reflection started laughing.

“Oh, give it a break. Don’t you get it? She only helps people to try to pretend she’s human. That’s all she does anything for. She _NEVER cared about you!_”

“SHUT UP!” Madeline roared. That was _not_ true. She really _had_ cared about Mr. Oshiro, even if a lot of what she’d been doing had been partially motivated by trying to do the opposite of what her draconic nature tried to make her do. “I just wanted to help…”

Her reflection smirked, insulted them both, and then vanished in a puff of purple glitter, leaving Madeline to take the consequences. 

The consequences turned out to be Mr. Oshiro going berserk and trying to kill her.

God_damn_ Madeline hated her reflection.


	2. i'm no stranger to the heartache and the pain (ch4-6)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from Owl City's Silhouette which feels really weird because I have in progress works whose titles are from that song and I keep going "but that's...the song for the _other_ fic"

Madeline darted out of the gondola almost before it stopped moving, dropping to her knees in the snow. Theo’s feather exercises had mostly gotten her breathing under control and the ice out of her veins, and the sudden lack of a headache was also helping, but she was still scared and excessively tired.

Madeline was so distracted by the relief from the lack of a headache- she hadn’t realized how much it had _hurt_\- that she almost missed Theo walking up behind her. (The crunch of the snow sounded a little louder than usual, but not uncomfortably so.)

“Feeling any better?” Theo asked, concern clear in his voice.

Madeline nodded. “Yeah. Thanks for helping me calm down. And for somehow getting rid of my headache?”

She picked herself up off the ground, brushed the snow off her winter pants, and scratched again at the itchy spot on her chin, thinking. It was really good that Theo had known that the gondola would start moving again; Madeline had thought that he’d definitely perish, even if she were able to survive the fall.

Speaking of…

“How _did_ you know we’d start moving again?” she asked, turning to look at him for a moment.

Theo smiled at her. “Oh, I totally thought we were done for,” he said flippantly. 

Madeline couldn’t even be mad.

She looked back at the building in front of them, wondering what it was, and so was surprised when Theo abruptly snorted. She froze for a moment. 

“Oh. My. God.”

Madeline spun around to find Theo looking at his phone and visibly trying not to laugh. “Look at this selfie though!” he cried, almost shoving the phone at her.

It was a photo of the two of them at the moment the gondola had stopped, and it looked _ridiculous_. Madeline felt her fear vanish as she burst into laughter, and Theo, too, gave up on trying not to laugh.

After what was probably several minutes of laughing and making fun of how silly they looked in the ridiculous selfie, Madeline felt far more relaxed around Theo than she expected.

Theo abruptly swung his bag off and set it down on a mostly snow-free patch of ground and started rummaging around in it.

“Well, after struggling through that blizzard and dealing with that scare, I’m hungry.” He paused, staring at his bag for a moment.

“And I think my energy bars are duplicating.”

Madeline snorted, and went digging in her own bag for her trail mix; Theo mentioning energy bars had her realize that she was actually really hungry. This was unusual; even more unusual (for Madeline) was that food actually sounded _good_, rather than merely another boring chore that would make things a little better like it had for the past few years.

She was pretty sure she was enjoying her snack more than Theo was enjoying his even with the very annoying ulcers on one side of her tongue (they’d been there for weeks now and she was pretty sure she was accidentally biting her tongue in her sleep), as it was nuts with various flavourings, dried fruit, and some very tasty cheese, while Theo had energy bars and in Madeline’s experience those usually tasted like cardboard. 

(She had, in fact, _verified_ that they tasted like cardboard.)

Madeline was vindicated when Theo made an upset noise. “What kind of flavour is _this_?” Her vindication, however, soon turned to surprise when Theo complained, “Why does it taste like soy?”

She was filled with a kind of absurd curiosity. Usually she stamped down her urges to get tastes of random people’s food, but in this case her curiosity ran out.

“...Soy? That sounds bad. Can I taste it?” 

Theo turned out to have broken a bit off to taste, and just passed the entire rest of the bar to Madeline. 

The wrapper had a brand logo of a cricket, which Madeline thought was amusing and probably was supposed to advertise that it’d make whoever ate it so full of energy they’d bound around like a cricket. She couldn’t quite make out the brand name, or anything else aside from the cricket logo, as she’d left her glasses in the car and didn’t feel like trying to find the perfect distance where it was far enough away from her face for it to be clear and close enough for the letters to be big enough to read.

To her surprise, it did not taste at all like cardboard, not even in aftertaste. It actually tasted like a bizarre and weirdly pleasant mix of peanut butter and the soy sauce that Theo had complained about.

“Who even designed these flavours? Peanut butter and _soy sauce flavour? _And it’s… _sweet_?” 

Theo sighed. “It’s supposed to be peanut butter and jelly. It is _bad_. I swear I only packed one box of those, because I hadn’t had them before, but there’s a random extra lone bar. The blueberry flavour and the chocolate flavour are good, if you want one with sensible flavours.”

Madeline shook her head. “No. No, I actually like this flavour. It has no business being at all pleasant to eat and yet somehow I’d rather have this than most of my trail mix.” 

Even knowing that dragons were greedy, Madeline found herself blindsided by the strength of her desire to get another one of the absurdly, inexplicably good-tasting peanut-butter-and-soy energy bars. She found herself staring at Theo’s bag and even half-raising her hand, fighting the urge to just steal them.

Theo laughed and fished out the opened box, stuffing the mystery extra bar and two other bars with different packaging colours into the box before tossing it to her. “Have the entire lot, since you’re probably the only person on this entire mountain… no, entire _province_ that thinks _peanut butter and soy sauce_ is a good flavour.”

After scarfing down five of the energy bars- they really were weirdly good- Madeline joined Theo in investigating the large, strange building that appeared to be built into the mountainside.

Madeline saw a lot of the telltale shine of mirrors from the interior, and immediately began worrying that her reflection was going to show up and ruin things some more. Theo simply seemed excited for the chance to go exploring someplace dark and mysterious. 

Madeline tried to warn him of the danger without actually bringing up how part of her had _escaped from a mirror_\- it sounded unbelievable and wouldn’t help her case- but Theo ignored her and rushed inside to take yet more pictures. 

At first, Madeline couldn’t muster up the nerve to follow him. She paced around outside the strange temple, climbed on the gondola, bounced up and down in the snow, and even clambered and dashed her way to a tiny cave under the ledge, where she found another of the mountain’s many mysterious, massive strawberries.

Finally, after several minutes of anxiety-induced hyperactivity, Madeline managed to get herself into the temple. Something seemed off about her reflection, but it was the correct colour, and so broken up by the small size of the mirrors that she couldn’t tell what it was past the blur.

Inside, after crawling through a narrow gap that was _definitely_ not there when Theo had snapped a photo only a few minutes ago, Madeline found a large room with many large blocks of metal and stone on glowing white tracks.

It was very, very obviously supernatural. And not just because the blocks moved when she dashed.

After some clambering and dashing around, she found a very large mirror, and in front of it what looked like a discarded phone, light still on.

Cold dread filled her as she walked towards it. Was this a trap, some supernatural monster luring her like an anglerfish? Was this _actually_ Theo’s phone, and if so, _why was it on the floor_? Had he been kidnapped or killed or teleported off somewhere or- or maybe it just fell out of his pocket. It had to have just fallen out of his pocket. He’d be fine.

Madeline was just beginning to convince herself of that enough to turn and leave, phone in hand- it had not been a supernatural monster after all- when she got a good look at her reflection in the mirror.

And its very definitely _not human_ ears.

Suddenly rooted to the spot with fear, Madeline reached up and touched her ear. It was long and pointy and fluffy, and flattened back against her head.

Madeline took a deep breath, and thought of the feather. Theo couldn’t have seen. She’d just go back into human form, and everything would be fine.

She tried to transform properly, and was driven to her knees by a sudden stab of pain. Somebody screamed. It took Madeline until after the pain had started to fade to realize that it was her.

She had a deathgrip on her ear now, and could plainly feel that at no point had it transformed at all. She was stuck like this.

Curled up on the black stone floor, Madeline seriously considered simply running and hiding. Only the cracked phone in her pants pocket kept her from simply leaving; she had to give it to Theo. Even if it meant him seeing her for the inhuman monster she really was, she _had to give him his phone back._

Madeline sat there, and breathed, and thought of the feather, until the last of the tingling ache of the blocked transformation faded from her head, leaving only a familiar _itch_.

Then she picked herself up and went to find Theo.

_________________________________

Madeline landed on the suddenly purple stone floor with a _thump_. Motes of red light, like embers from a forgotten fire or possibly red glitter catching the sourceless light, floated around her- it was just light enough that she couldn’t tell without her glasses. Barbed tentacle _things_ covered the walls. Statues bracketed her, stony faces of the strange eye monsters she’d just seen in her nightmare. Red, thorny vines snaked their way through the dark corners of the room, in total defiance of how plants worked. The walls were a patchwork of dark purple, slimy-looking patches of green, and _goddamn beige_. 

And worst of all, there was her dragon-form reflection, floating curled up in the air, _blocking the_ _only way out._ It had its wings half-flared, long membrane-supported wing-fingers (all three of them on each wing) twitching, and its long tail had all the fan of feathers sticking as far out as they could.

Madeline didn’t waste time standing around. She charged towards her reflection, and was both gratified and annoyed when it dashed away to float above a pit of tentaspikes, ducking its head momentarily as if displaying its horns while running away looked like anything but hiding behind them.

“_HEY!_ Where are we?!” Madeline shouted. “What did you do to Theo? What did you to _me?_”

To her shock, her reflection started laughing.

“You think I’m doing this? That’s cute. Sweetheart, this is exactly what I warned you about.” 

Seeming to notice Madeline’s increasing anger, her reflection darted backwards to float above a _different_ pit of tentaspikes. She dashed after it.

“Don’t try to make this _my_ fault,” she snarled. Actually snarled, suddenly-sharp teeth bared as her transformation broke down a little more.

“You still don’t get it?” Her reflection laughed, before dropping the amused act to stare at her with what looked like utter seriousness. “The Mountain gave me this body.” The serious look evaporated like morning dew, giving way to near-silent, rumbling chuckles.

“I’m not the only _creepy_ thing living in that messed up head of yours.” It stopped laughing, at least, to look smug at her. “Don’t like what you see? _What a surprise._” 

“Shut up!”

“I _tried_ to stop you. I _tried_ to tell you that you couldn’t handle this, and you couldn’t pretend forever.” It suddenly leaned forward, furious. “Look into the mirror, _all of this is yours!_ This temple only magnifies the Mountain’s power.” It seemed to calm down, and looked at her with the same deadly seriousness as before. 

“You’re in control here, not me. You’re the one who _broke her ability to pass for human, _not me.”

It was running out of pits of tentaspikes to hover over, but still found one more to fly to. Madeline followed it.

“I don’t believe you.”

She _couldn’t_ believe it. It _had_ to be this place. Madeline wasn’t some unreasoning monster or heartless, greedy beast like every dragon she’d seen in all the media she’d consumed over her lifetime, so she _had_ to be succeeding in being human _somehow_.

She _couldn’t_ have broken her ability to look human. It _had_ to be this place, and her reflection _had_ to be lying to hurt her.

“If you’re _part of me_, why do you want to hurt me?”

“Poor Madeline, _always the victim_.” It looked outright annoyed, like Madeline was asking the dumbest question it had ever heard.

Then it suddenly flipped into fury again.

“All I do is babysit you, and you hate me for it! You’re unravelling- _dying_\- and you know it.”

Madeline had no clue where it got the idea that she was dying from. She felt fine! Better than usual, even, despite being..._very mad_.

“If you care so much about protecting me, why didn’t you just _explain_ what was going on?!” 

It sighed and rolled its eyes. “Like you would have listened? You never do.”

This time, it flew to just over solid ground. Madeline followed it, threw aside all her defenses, and _begged._

It laughed in her face. Mocked her. And, worst of all, claimed she _deserved_ this.

It took all Madeline had to tell it to shut _up_, that she didn’t _need_ its help. The defiance felt hollow and fake, and yet her reflection disappeared instantly as if banished by the words. 

The dread in Madeline’s chest remained. It would be back.

Taking a deep breath, Madeline calmed herself as much as she could and set off, hoping against hope that it wasn’t too late to save Theo.

___________

Madeline was falling. For a moment, she flailed, trying to figure out which way was up, until it suddenly came to her. She could plainly feel, in detail that increased by the moment, how to level out. All she needed to do was drop some of the transformation and roll over, spread her wings even a little to slow her fall and let her steer.

The urge to right herself was so strong it took all of Madeline’s willpower to keep herself still, plunging to an unknown but probably lethal fate. A human might flail and scream; Madeline had no instinctual fear of being high in the air, only one of losing control of her flight.

She knew that she’d probably hit something lethally sharp. She knew she was almost certainly falling to her death, and that no amount of being able to shrug off impacts would help her. It was over, anyway; she hadn’t even been able to do _this_. She’d been so _close_, and she hadn’t made it. It was over. Why had she even tried? What had been the _point_? She never would make it. She’d never amount to anything good; nothing could make up for the fact that, at her core, she was not human, and never would be.

There was a distant, tangled knot of pain in her chest. Her vision suddenly blurred with unexplained tears that whipped away in the wind.

Her only regret was that she had never said goodbye. 

__________

Madeline landed hard on the surprisingly lush grass, bounded forward, and saw to her dismay the familiar blue crow that usually meant the old lady was nearby.

It cawed gratingly at her as she got close, then started pecking at the grass. 

She trudged across the bright blue rock, kicking aside a pebble and resolutely ignoring the urge to pick it up and take it home. Jumping up onto the sharply green grass, she found an elevator, a patch of brighter sunlight streaming through a crack in the ceiling, and what looked like mushroom boxes with mushrooms tall enough to be individually up to her waist even without the box. And the old lady. Of course she was here. Of course she had to see Madeline like this, stuck unable to take human form properly; her ears were still draconic, and there was fine fluff and feathering on her hands and arms, split down the middle with the side closer to her body feathered and the side further away covered in something almost like fur.

Madeline wondered how this whole cavern was even _lit_. Logically speaking, it should be dark, and yet it seemed to be in only slight shadow. 

As soon as she got close, the old lady greeted her. “Oh, hello again,” she said, cheerfully. Madeline glared.

“Of _course_ you’re here,” she grumbled.

“Callin’ it quits I see,” the old lady said. Madeline was pretty sure she was mocking her.

“No. I fell. It’s over.”

“That’s probably for the best, if you don’t even have it in you to fly back up. The Mountain doesn’t pull any punches.”

“Yeah, I get it. I wasn’t strong enough to climb your stupid mountain. I don’t _deserve_ to climb your stupid mountain. You can laugh at me again if you want.” Madeline didn’t want to admit to the old lady that she _couldn’t_ fly; it seemed embarrassing.

She was very annoyed when the old lady _actually laughed_; she found herself snapping at her, again. “I didn’t mean _actually laugh!_”

“Sometimes you gotta know when to throw in the towel. You’ll get over it,” the old lady said, smiling.

“You know what? I had a lot of time to think, climbing out of this cave...and I’m already _over it._ That _part of me_ was right, I can’t do this.” Madeline suddenly found herself fighting not to cry. “I’ll just...go home to my sad life and be miserable forever. Or just give in and be evil like my dragon instincts want me to be.”

“You clearly aren’t over it-wait, what? Dragon instincts don’t make you evil. Dragons are just...people.”

Theo had said something vaguely similar the previous night. Madeline had brushed it off as part of his ‘big softie older brother’ thing.

“Shut up. I _know_ I’m not over it. And _everyone_ knows that dragons are evil.”

The old lady actually looked vaguely sad. It was shocking enough to Madeline to make her pause for a moment, but before she could get a word in Madeline started talking again, calmer this time. 

“I don’t want to give up..but no matter how hard I try, she sabotages me every step of the way.”

“A lot of kids come here to climb this Mountain, only to give up. It’s a shame that you fell. I was starting to think you’d make it.” She paused for a moment. “Where’d you get the idea of dragons being evil from, the same shows that show them as all scaly when from the looks of it you’re a fluffball?” 

Madeline felt like the ground was being yanked out from under her feet. Fluff as morality? _What_?

“What makes _me_ so special?” she snapped, covering up her existential confusion with only partially-false anger.

“I’ve never met someone so _angry_ at themself.” The old lady burst out laughing. Madeline was beginning to suspect it wasn’t really out of actual amusement, but it certainly didn’t answer her actual question. 

“Honestly, I thought you’d reach the summit just to spite yourself!”

Madeline felt distinctly offended, which was a good distraction from the existential crisis. 

“This girl you’re talking about, it sounds like she’s holding you back. Talk to her. Figure out why she’s so scared.”

“You think she’s...scared? I guess I never thought of it that way. I just...thought she was a manifestation of everything draconic and bad about me. … She’s definitely mad at me, though.”

“Stop wasting both of our time and _ask her_. Both what she’s scared of and what she _really_ wants. Politely. What have you got to lose? And forget about the garbage you see on TV. The only show I’ve ever seen that depicts dragons accurately was that one where five people were trying to steal a potato made by a dragon in a lab.”

Madeline opened her mouth to say something, then stopped, unsure of what to say. After a few seconds, she settled on “_What?_”

The old lady laughed at her and didn’t offer any explanation. 

Madeline decided that it _probably_ made sense in context and stood there for a few seconds, thinking about what to say to her reflection. She’d definitely have to apologise for telling her that she should just be left behind on the mountain, if she wanted to be taken seriously. The more she thought of her as a _person_, and not as some monster, the more she felt an apology was _sorely _in order. She could probably think up how to phrase it while looking for her.

Which brought up the immediate logistical problem of _not knowing where to find her._

After another few more moments of thinking- and scratching at her chin again more out of habit than anything else, as it itched far less than normal for some reason and her ears had stopped itching entirely at some point during the night- Madeline resorted to asking the old lady. 

“She’s part of you, right? If you look for her, she won’t take long to find. You might have to fly, though.”

This spurred a short conversation about the Mountain’s power and how the old lady wasn’t fully warning people about the mountain. Madeline had probably been drawn into more actual conversations in the past two days than she usually got in over a week. 

She hadn’t really thought of the mountain as a place of _healing _before. 


	3. Reach for the Summit (Ch6-7)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title should be instantly recognizable given that it's from the Celeste soundtrack!

Madeline had managed to psych herself up into taking dragon form again for the first time in years. Dropping the transformation was a relief, like setting down a bag full of rocks; most of the tiny aches and pains she’d long since stopped noticing at all suddenly were gone. She could suddenly see more detail on the far cavern wall- not blazing into focus, but rather just more _detailed_, like the difference between a high-definition TV and an old CRT monitor. 

Dragon form was much warmer than human form, and surprisingly difficult to balance in. She still felt a little guilty for being in dragon form at all, but she pushed it aside, trying to convince herself all the way down that there was nothing wrong with being not human. She crouched, wobbled a little, and stepped forward to get a run-up for an attempt at flying past some of the strange blue bounce spheres, only to discover that she didn’t even know how to _walk_ in her dragon form anymore, let alone _fly._

The mountain took pity on her and saved her from falling to her sharp, pink, crystalline doom, which Madeline vowed to never tell anyone else about, mostly because it was embarrassing. Shaking herself off, she transformed just enough to be generally humanshaped, for the sake of her ability to walk, before setting off again in her quest to find the rest of her. She was still covered in feathers and fur-like fluff, horned, clawed, and with draconic ears; judging by the fact that she could still make out the cracks on a distant crystal, her eyes were probably not human either. 

At one point, she had to unzip her jacket. The cavern was relatively warm, and in between that and her feathers she found herself sweating.

Madeline found her reflection slumped as if dead on a patch of pale blue rock, still in full dragon form. She _had_ been easy to find- although not particularly easy to reach. Madeline noticed she also had her jacket unzipped, and suddenly found herself wondering how she got the sleeves to stay on over the leading edge of her wings; they were open at the back to allow for her wing membrane, after all. 

“Looking for me?” her reflection growled, ears pinned back in fear and anger. “I thought you were _done_ with me.” 

“That was a mistake,” Madeline said, as sincerely as she could. “I’m sorry.”

Her reflection scoffed. “You think you’ve got it _all figured out_. You think you don’t _need_ me. You think you can just be _human_, somehow.”

“I said I’m sorry. I said I was wrong. We need to move past this.”

Her reflection leapt into the air. Madeline noticed that even fully in dragon form like this, she wasn’t staying in the air by flapping; her wings were half-flared, their three-fingered hands balled into fists, and she just floated. 

“You expect me to trust you?!” she growled, lips pulled back to show her teeth.

“You aren’t innocent here either!” Madeline almost shouted, tensing at the sudden rush of echoed anger. She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, closed her eyes, and focused on what she really wanted. “But I know you’re scared.” She stepped forward.

“Look, we’re at rock bottom. There’s no point in fighting.”

Her reflection seemed to calm down, a little; she stopped snarling, and the panicky knot of fear and anger and hurt in Madeline’s chest loosened a little. She scoffed at her again, but Madeline noticed that her ears were still flattened back. (Dragon expressions were surprisingly easy to read once Madeline stopped trying to pretend that most of their emotional range didn’t exist.)

“I can keep digging. I could pull us down to the center of the earth.”

Madeline wondered what she had to prove to herself, still. What had she even _said_ to herself, to make her reflection so spiteful and distrusting? 

“What would be the point? Let’s climb out of here... _together_.”

There was a certain _rightness_ in echoing back what her reflection had said to her, only two short days ago.

It was somewhat spoiled by a sudden echo of worsening fear and her reflection shouting that if she came close she’d make her regret it.

Madeline went in for a hug anyways, and her reflection dashed back as if struck while puffing up like a scared cat, mane flaring and wriggling like feather tentacles. The bizarre chase was on.

This was quite possibly the strangest fight Madeline had ever witnessed, and she’d once seen her coworkers sparring with the goal of removing each other’s socks (last one without bare feet won); she was fighting part of her personified, her goal was tacklehugs, and her reflection’s goal was a tangled mess of GO AWAY and LISTEN TO ME.

If it had been less scary- or at least less dangerous- Madeline would probably have laughed. As it was, dodging lasers and ball lightning, slipping through gaps in spikes, and soaring, half-transformed, on wings of golden light, Madeline at least found herself smiling.

Every time she made contact, she noticed something else about her reflection. Like how _small_ she really was; standing relaxed and level and not counting the fluff, her back wasn’t quite level with the bottom of Madeline’s ribcage. Or the fact that, although she was wearing dragon-suited, goth versions of most of Madeline’s clothes, she wasn’t actually wearing anything on her feet; what Madeline had taken for purple socks were just different-coloured feathers. 

She was fluffed up like a terrified cat. Feathers stuck out from the large wing-holes in her shirt, left her clothes bulging like she’d stuffed papers down them (Madeline had done that, once, while drunk), and made her look a little bigger and a lot more ridiculous. Her pants had a short tailsleeve; Madeline hadn’t had any reason to notice earlier, but the way it made it look like her tail suddenly got twice as wide after seven centimeters was comical.

For a moment, landing in a large passage with her reflection floating just above the ground and secondhand exhaustion weighting her limbs and making it difficult to stay human-shaped enough to not trip over her own feet, Madeline thought she’d won. 

She slowed to a walk, and went in for a gentle hug rather than the flying tacklehugs she’d done earlier. Her reflection flinched backwards, in sharp contrast to the angry tone she took as she snarled, “I did you a favour.”

Madeline walked forward calmly again, hand outstretched. She had to jump and dash over a pond and clamber up onto a rock to reach her reflection this time. 

“You aren’t a _mountain climber,_” her reflection hissed, angry and upset and looking like she was actually crying a little. Madeline’s own eyes stung, suddenly.

Madeline calmly walked off the rock, landing with a splash in the pond beneath it. (Maybe her reflection was avoiding the pond to prevent her feathers from getting wet; wet birds always looked sad, so maybe wet feathery dragons did too.)

She noticed, suddenly, that her reflection appeared to be surrounded by a diffuse cloud of red-and-purple glitter shedding off her feathers and clothes, and had to try not to snicker. How many times had she teleported to get that covered in glitter?

This time, her reflection let her actually brush her hand against her shoulder before dashing away straight through the end of the passage, blasting open a short tunnel. _“I’m just trying to help you! I’m just trying to keep you alive!”_ she sobbed, voice cracking. 

Madeline could feel the echo of that distress, a knot of secondhand pain and fear. She really _was_ trying to help, Madeline realized, even despite the lasers and ball lightning; she just had some bad ideas about _how_ to help, and probably how to phrase her advice, alongside being scared of her.

For the first time, Madeline wondered what it meant that her own reflection was too scared of her to believe she really intended kindness.

The blurriness in her vision cleared up, as much as it ever did without her glasses, and Madeline felt tears running down her face.

“None of this would have _happened_ if you had _listened to me!_” 

That was true; as far as Madeline could tell, none of this entire climb would have happened if she’d listened to her. 

But then she never would have met Theo. She never would have seen what she’d seen. She never would have _saved_ Theo. He’d still be trapped in that crystal.

At that awful thought, her reflection actually _flashed_ with power, dashing to the corner of the room. Several large, somewhat loosely-attached looking blocks of stone on the ceiling shuddered, gained a faint pink glow (a pulse of secondhand effort making Madeline almost want to just sit down then and there), and fell. Just before Madeline actually jumped on one, however, they shot back up, and this time some of the effort wasn’t secondhand. Her reflection was actually tapping into Madeline’s magical energy; her reflection’s wings and mane were fading and looked translucent, and Madeline felt vaguely, second-handedly dizzy. She wasn’t sure how much more her reflection could _take_ of this. 

Madeline shot forward again, hoping to stop her reflection before she exhausted herself to the point of collapse.

____________________

Madeline stepped forwards, legs trembling, into the cavern. It appeared to consist of a pond with a small island in the middle. Her reflection was collapsed on the island, mane still raised and crackling with energy she was too exhausted to use. Her wing membrane was almost transparent, and Madeline could faintly make out the edge of the island right through her, as if she was a cellophane cutout. 

Madeline dashed over the pond, hoping to be able to do _something_ to help. When she got close, however, her reflection looked up. Madeline’s shoulders slumped in relief. Still conscious, then. 

Her reflection sighed. “Fine,” she said, defeatedly. “You win.”

Her voice cracked again and Madeline felt tears pricking at her eyes. “I guess you don’t need me after all. If you want me to go away, I’ll try.” 

Madeline swallowed past the lump in her throat. That wasn’t what she wanted. That was what she’d done this entire fight to try to convince her reflection that she didn’t want. 

“That’s not what I want. I need your help now more than ever. Please. Let’s work together.” It seemed like the kind of thing her reflection would want, although at the momentary look of dread on her reflection’s face Madeline wondered if she’d said the wrong thing.

“Work together? You’re joking, right? After all these years…”

Madeline stepped forward slowly. Her reflection didn’t flinch back, but Madeline couldn’t tell if this was because she didn’t mind or because she was too tired to keep running.

Slowly and cautiously, she reached out and put her hand on her reflection’s wing near the hand, alert for even the slightest increase in her anxiety.

Nothing, and this time when she made contact her reflection relaxed marginally despite herself.

As warmly and kindly as she could manage, Madeline told her, “It’s okay to be scared.”

The crackling pink energy evaporated, and her reflection relaxed. Her mane lay flat, like ordinary feathers. She slumped a little further, muscles no longer held rigid. She still looked upset, but with how much she’d exhausted herself that was actually a bit of a relief to Madeline; she was worried her reflection might simply keel over. 

Madeline held her other arm open for a hug. After a moment of her reflection looking horribly uncertain and confused- like she couldn’t process what was happening- she leaned in, squirming around and raising one wing to try to hug her back.

Madeline gladly wrapped her in a hug, and found herself enveloped in her reflection’s wings in return. Even with the surprisingly sharp-feeling ridge down the middle of her reflection’s narrow chest jabbing her in the shoulder, the hug was probably the best Madeline had ever had. She buried her face against her reflection’s neck, and wasn’t sure if her quiet, happy crying was an echo from her reflection or the other way around.

Some of her reflection’s mane bundled back up into tentacles, but this time they were calm tentacles, lifting slightly and shaking along with the rest of her feathers. (Madeline had goosebumps, and was conscious of the fact that she felt warmer than she had in a long, _long_ time.) 

Madeline was just considering shifting to dragon form fully when her reflection began to glow pink. After less than a second, she abruptly dissolved into light. Madeline’s arms closed on air, briefly hugging herself as she scrambled up, hoping to see her reflection again and worrying, suddenly, that the sheer _effort_ she’d put into that fight had somehow killed her.

The light gathered into spheres which orbited her like tiny, shining moons, before swinging in to merge into her skin in bursts of warmth and, for some reason, pink confetti and glitter. The fear vanished and she found herself recalling mornings as a kid, watching some weird show about fights that dragged on for forever.

Stretching, Madeline hummed to herself, bounced in place, and thought, for a moment, on how she felt better- both physically and mentally- than she had in years, even despite the disappointment of not being able to properly hug her other self anymore. Hugging herself just didn’t quite match up.

Then she abruptly felt incredibly restless, and spent several minutes essentially running around in circles only to eventually figure out it was her reflection’s way of trying to tell her she had two dashes now.

Complaining to herself that words would have been more clear only got the sensation of amusement. 

___________________

With the power of her reflection (and more of Theo’s mysterious and definitely duplicating energy bars) on her side, Madeline found that she could take a faster (if riskier) route to the summit than on her first ascent. Even accounting for that and the surge of energy she’d gotten from fusing with her other self- who had floated _Badeline_ as a name, and then laughed at it for almost a minute- she was ascending far, far faster than she expected.

Theo had called half-transformed Badeline “an adorable goth Madeline”, and hadn’t seemed fazed by her floating in midair or trying to hide behind Madeline. She was glad.

She could feel her other self watching her. She still was distrustful and afraid, but the anger and the judgement were gone. Madeline tried to reassure her every chance she got, and tried to catch thoughts that made her mentally flinch. A lot of what she was saying felt hollow to her, or even outright fake, but Badeline seemed incredibly grateful.

Badeline mostly stayed fused, at first, only unfusing to take strawberries Madeline found and stash them somewhere.

It took until she was perched on a tiny ledge just under the forsaken city for Badeline to decide to unfuse to talk face to face.

“We’re getting the hang of that,” Madeline said, smiling. Badeline was clinging vertically to the cliff face with feet and wings in a way that reminded Madeline of a gecko; in addition to freeing up space on the ledge and seemingly being comfortable for Badeline, it put her head at Madeline’s eye height without her having to look up.

“The launch thing? If you say so…”

Madeline figured she needed some reassurance. Putting on her most determined face, Madeline boasted, “This mountain doesn’t stand a chance!”

To her surprise, her reflection flinched. “Stop jinxing it.”

Madeline bit her lip.

“Hey. Uh. I just… wanted to say I’m sorry. For… a lot.”

Badeline didn’t answer, instead floating towards her to fuse again.

_______________________________

“How are you feeling?” Madeline asked, worried. She’d been a little anxious for several minutes now, and she wanted to know why.

“I’m fine. I’m just- waiting for something to go wrong.” 

Madeline did her best to look both serious and encouraging. “No matter what happens, I’ll be right there with you.” She hoped her partially transformed state- covered in feathers and with her horns poking out from her hair- helped convince her.

If anything, she looked even more scared. “You know what’s _really_ scary?” Her expression abruptly smoothed to total calm and seriousness. Even her ears were barely giving anything away.

“I’m starting to believe you.”

Madeline smiled, and opened her arms and crouched slightly for a re-fusing hug.

_____________________

“Nice job back there,” Badeline said with a genuine smile. It was possibly the best shock of Madeline’s life.

“Look at you!” 

Madeline abruptly remembered that she’d narrowly evaded Badeline going to launch her in order to blast open a block of ice with her dash, and suddenly suspected that the complement had been at least partially a pun.

In between that and…well, everything else, Madeline couldn’t resist teasing her.

To her credit, Badeline looked merely annoyed at the teasing, rather than the moment of absolute terror she’d had earlier when Madeline had asked her if she knew she looked ridiculous when puffed up as much as she could voluntarily fluff.

“Hey! You didn’t mind the teasing! That’s fantastic!”

Instead of answering, Badeline fused again.

Only a few minutes later, she unfused. “I hate this place,” she announced, staring at the rapidly moving black-and-red fuzzy goop. “But at least it has good art.” 

Madeline nodded. “Good art that I keep wanting to take,” she groused. “Why’d you want to steal the art?” 

Badeline looked hurt, a little. “Our house is too beige and you shot down repainting it as greedy and too much work but you saw a painting on the floor and _we want it._”

Madeline hadn’t been aware that houses could be too much of one colour. “Too...beige?” Badeline flinched for a moment, apparently on reflex, because she relaxed immediately after and looked almost excited to be able to explain. 

“Yes!” Badeline nodded vigorously, smiling. “It’s all _beige._ Lots of visual information but it’s all the same visual information, so no visual _stimulation _and we’re understimulated almost all the time. It gets hard to visually determine depth because the walls blend in so well with the floor, and forces our eyes to work hard for far less information than anything with more colour could. And beige is a bad colour anyway.”

Madeline winced. “How long were you trying to tell me we needed to repaint?”

“Since we moved in. You had more energy, then, but you kept shooting down having other colours in your life as greedy. After a while I started to believe you.”

Madeline stepped forwards for an apology hug. Before she could even start to crouch, Badeline had started leaning up; leaning up enough for the tip of her tail to brush the ground, she could get her wings around Madeline’s shoulders comfortably.

Despite the fact that every previous instance of hugging Badeline had involving fusing, Madeline still nearly fell over when it happened. 

_______________

Madeline landed with a bounce on the hard ground. Badeline unfused and floated beside her, looking somewhat worried; before she could voice her concern, Madeline was already checking to make sure she hadn’t lost anything from her pockets. They were still zipped up, so her water bottle, trail mix, and energy bars were all still there. 

She glanced back at the hotel, staring at the wall of black goop that had forced a launch. As mad at Mr. Oshiro as she was, she was still concerned; that was a _lot_ of anxiety goop. “I hope Mr. Oshiro is okay.”

She was not expecting to start an argument. 

One argument later, Badeline had apologised for snapping at Mr. Oshiro. She didn’t fuse back into Madeline right away, this time; instead she kept on floating alongside. For a few minutes, they walked in companionable silence. (Madeline kept glancing over to check she was still there, and was always relieved to find she was.)

Finally, Badeline broke the silence. 

“Maddie? You don’t seem to hate me anymore, so why do you not take dragon form?” 

Madeline paused, embarrassed. She wasn’t sure how to say ‘_because I forgot how to work that body_’ in a non-embarrassing manner. After a few moments, though, she took a deep breath and transformed.

Immediately, she noticed that despite the lack of shoes and that she could clearly feel the snow with her toes, her feet weren’t cold from the snow; the feathering kept them warm. In addition, her chin itched much worse again; she’d forgotten how bad it had been already.

She also noticed that her balance was immediately worse. She started stumbling forward, hoping her new acceptance of her species as just an innate part of her would let her tap into Badeline’s clearly working muscle memory.

“Madeline? Madeline, no, not like that, you’ll fa-” Badeline was interrupted by Madeline tripping over her own feet again. Her attempt to stabilize herself by flinging an arm out merely resulted in her accidentally wingslapping Badeline and landing on her side instead of on her front. Badeline peered worriedly at her.

“That’s...not how your legs work…”

Madeline tried to snark back, but what came out of her mouth was definitely not words. Badeline looked even more worried. “Did you _actually_ forget how to talk like this?”

Madeline made a noise best transcribed as “grnarrgh”, rolling over onto her front to at least try to get her feet under herself. This was surprisingly uncomfortable; a lot of her weight rested on the ridge down her chest, and it felt about the same as putting pressure on the more bony parts of her wrist in human form. She also did not succeed at getting her feet under her properly. 

Badeline bit her lip, then picked Madeline up and set her back on her feet. She wobbled a little, but only a little.

“So, the first thing you got wrong is that you forgot you were digitigrade now, and were mostly bending your legs at the knees-” Badeline tapped Madeline on the knee, which was higher up than she expected- “instead of both the knees and ankles. You were also keeping your toes straight the whole step, they’re prehensile and are supposed to close when you have your foot up. You keep your tail too loose, it’s involved in balance…”

Madeline took a cautious step forward, leaning on Badeline for balance. Then another, and another, until she was stumbling along only a little awkwardly and Badeline had started talking about how her wings articulated instead. 

Even though she no longer needed to lean on Badeline, she did not let go.

__________________

Madeline reached the top of her arc, hair almost brushing the roof of the small cave she was in after two consecutive boosts from Badeline. She waited until the gap in the wall in front of her was just starting to be slightly above her, then dashed forwards to just barely miss Badeline. Trying to recover from that, Madeline transformed just enough to have wings again- she’d gone back into her partial transformation when the pits of crystalline spikes started showing up- and tried to fly towards her.

This didn’t work, and she slammed into a cracked patch of cliff, narrowly missing the deadly-sharp looking crystalline spikes. The cliff turned out to be a patch of cave wall so unstable it collapsed from the force of Madeline hitting it. She landed on her back in the cave, panting and trembling slightly and wishing she knew how to fly. She knew Badeline’s bubble-boosts needed to be in places with very specific magical conditions and couldn’t move freely very far without anchoring to a new and probably far away working spot, but emotionally she still felt slightly betrayed.

Then she realized that, incongruously, a strawberry was floating above her. She snatched it out of the air as she stood up and leapt into Badeline’s arms for a boost.

“That was a close one!” Madeline shouted over the windrush.

Badeline looked guilty and as terrified as Madeline still felt, even as she touched down. “Yeah, I wasn’t sure if we’d make it.”

Madeline found herself suddenly doubting the whole summit rush. Badeline had been right about so many things. Maybe she’d been right about this one. 

“Maybe you were right. Maybe this _is_ too dangerous.”

Badeline didn’t look at her, instead staring off at the Mirror Temple up above. After a second of uncertainty, her face hardened.

“_No. _I was wrong. We can climb this Mountain.” She turned, looking straight at Madeline with a smile. “I’ve got your back,” she said, before that familiar nervous look returned. “And...I believe in you.”

Madeline put a hand on her shoulder. (She didn’t dare to go in for a hug, as she wanted to keep talking to Badeline in person and fusing seemed to just _happen_ whenever they hugged.)

“Thank you. That means a lot to me.” It really did, far more than she felt like she could ever articulate.

They hoisted themselves up onto a wooden platform, staring at the Mirror Temple.

“I hate this place, too,” announced Badeline. “But it’ll be less bad this time. No more tentacle monsters. No more darkness.”

Madeline trusted her. She’d know what the inside of Madeline’s head was like.

“Hey, isn’t this the place where you claimed I was dying? What was that about?”

Badeline shuffled her wings nervously. “The fact that you’d been living off of pasta salad, toast, and potatoes for months before deciding to go mountain climbing. And before _that _you were eating mostly the same things but with the addition of _other types of salad _in sandwiches.”

“Wait, really? I thought I was eating alright?”

Badeline shook her head. “No! It was _all starch_, and before that, something was missing- aside from protein- and I don’t know what the word for it is. It is in those energy bars, though. But not salad. I know we weren’t up to much, but you weren’t even putting the salad on the toast! It got _boring_! That wasn’t helpful!“

“Wait, is _that_ why I kept randomly wanting to steal people’s food?”

Badeline nodded. “You kept saying it was greedy, but it didn’t _matter_, because it was about trying to keep you safe and healthy, but you didn’t seem to _care_.”

She nosed at Madeline’s arm. “But we’re doing better, now. Weren’t we climbing? We can do this.”

Madeline cracked her knuckles and started planning her route; it’d have to involve a red bubble, as there was a large chasm and it contained spikes. 

Just as Badeline started leaning on her to fuse, though, Madeline had an idea. 

“Do you know why my chin itches worse in this form?” 

Badeline didn’t stop leaning on her, but did stop trying to fuse for a moment to say, “Velvet.”

It was a very laconic answer, but it didn’t need to be any longer; Madeline had dealt with horn velvet before, although she’d thought her horns had stopped growing years ago.

Scratching had apparently been the right idea. She’d just been in the wrong form.

___________________________

“This is it; the home stretch.” Madeline’s determined expression was entirely real this time. “We’re so close. We’re going to make it!” she said, excitedly.

Badeline didn’t seem to share in her excitement. “Yeah…” she said, in a tone more suited to discussing a funeral.

“What’s wrong?” Madeline asked, worried. 

Badeline took a deep breath. “I’m just…” she said, then paused for what to Madeline seemed like an almost unbearably long time, fiddling with the same two feathers on her wing over and over again.

“I’m sorry. I was holding you back. I need to learn to actually trust you, I’ve only been pretending.” 

Madeline understood completely. She wouldn’t trust herself either.

“It’s not your fault. I tried to leave you behind.” The _‘I wanted you dead’ _went unspoken; Madeline couldn’t bear to voice it, and Badeline knew anyway. “And honestly, I’ve been trying to leave you behind my entire life, even when it hurt me. _I’m_ sorry. I wish I tried to understand you sooner. I was too proud, or stubborn, or _something_.”

Badeline nodded. “We wasted so much time and energy. We spent so long just _hurting_.” She looked up at the peak, so close now, then back at Madeline. “At least we’re finally talking about it.”

“Yeah…” said Madeline, most of her focus on trying to figure out if there was anything she could do to help Badeline trust her, and to be worthy of that trust. 

“I’m glad the Mountain brought you out. I think we can move past this. If we can climb this mountain together, we can do anything.”

Badeline looked momentarily reassured, but only momentarily. “What if we don’t make it?”

Madeline thought about it for a moment. “I’d be okay with that.”

Badeline’s ears pinned back. “You would?” she said, sounding shocked.

“Of course. I’m just glad we’re _trying_. I really needed to do this.” 

Badeline relaxed. She still looked a little upset, at first. “I’m finally starting to understand why.” Suddenly, she smiled. “Let’s finish it,” she said determinedly, and fused with Madeline before she could ask if there was anything in particular she could do to be more trustworthy.

___________

Madeline felt her grip start to give out. Throwing caution to the wind, she kicked off as hard as she could upwards, wishing she had one more dash. She just barely managed to throw herself onto the wooden platform by the progress flag, and lay there, gasping for air. (It took her so much longer to catch her breath up here near the summit.)

Four more flags to go, she thought, trying to motivate herself to stand back up. It didn’t seem to be working.

Badeline unfused, took one look at her, and gently rested a wing over her back. “Break time.”

Madeline nodded, suddenly aware of the fact that it _was_ okay to take a break and feeling a little silly for forgetting. She’d been dashing and jumping and climbing nonstop without a break since the Mirror Temple, too excited to realize how _exhausted_ she’d been getting; this break was probably long overdue.

If she was going to have a break, she figured, she might as well be in dragon form. Transforming, she found it _immediately_ easier to breathe. After a moment’s confusion, she realized it made sense; her dragon body probably had to be prepared to possibly fly this high, while her human form was more adapted to being..._not three kilometers up._

She was still exhausted, but at least she was able to breathe easy. Rolling over onto her back, Madeline contemplated getting her water bottle out of her pocket. 

After several seconds of lying there thinking about it and not actually attempting it- a familiar state- Madeline managed to get herself to start trying to reach her pockets with her wing-hands in a useful manner. Badeline stared at her with her head tilted. It took three attempts, and if anyone other than Badeline were watching her, Madeline would have felt ashamed.

After some struggling with the water bottle, Madeline managed to get it open and drink from it, having only spilt a little.

Getting the cap back on was harder- Madeline found herself having to hold the bottle with her feet, which she was starting to realize were actually more dexterous than her hands in this form, probably because there were two opposable toes on each foot- but surprisingly satisfying to do. It was like a bizarre puzzle.

Since her pocket was already unzipped, Madeline decided it was a good time for a snack. This was also difficult, but she was starting to get the hang of it. She just had to remember how different her proportions were, that three of the six fingers she had on each hand in this form were supporting wing membrane, and that she could also use her feet. 

Lying on her back using both her feet and hands to try to untie a knot, Madeline realized she had time to ask Badeline questions. She opened her mouth to ask her if there was anything in particular she really wanted, and was unpleasantly surprised when what she actually said was not in any way words.

Badeline lay down next to her, took a breath, and started talking, sensation-sharing as much as she could; it made Madeline feel motion-sick despite both of them sitting still, but it _did_ give Madeline some idea of what she was doing wrong. After a few sentences- Badeline seemed to be quoting random songs- Madeline joined in.

As soon as Badeline seemed to think that Madeline was able to make at least _vaguely_ the right sounds, she stopped talking and the ill feeling faded. Madeline found that what she was saying rapidly devolved into stringed-together syllables with few actual words, and started trying to impose a rhythm on it.

“Madeline, no. That’s singing.”

She grinned, and began actively trying to sing her favourite song. 

“Madeline, _no_. That’s _bad_ singing.”

She paused, stuck her tongue out, and went back to singing.

________________

Madeline stumbled to the flag in dragon form, grinning and panting for air; after her break, she had felt re-energized enough that she’d taken off in a run. Badeline unfused and floated in the air beside her, at a slight angle so her head was several feet above Madeline’s. 

“We actually did it,” she said, wonderingly. “I can’t believe it!”

Madeline finished panting and looked up at the view. 

It instantly took her breath away again.

“Wow! It’s so beautiful! Look at how far we’ve come!” She bounced on her feet in excitement, almost overbalancing and falling over. Taking it as a hint, she flopped down to lie somewhat sideways, resting her legs without putting weight on the middle of her chest.

Badeline remained floating close to her head as if tethered by an invisible string. 

“I’m glad I got to see this before I…,” she said, then winced, seeming to have difficulty finishing the sentence. “Well, before I…”

It took Madeline a few moments to figure out what she was saying. “Oh, right. When we leave the mountain, you won’t be able to talk to me anymore...at least not like this. I’ll miss you.” She thought for a moment. “A lot.”

Badeline nodded. “Yeah. I know that we need to go home eventually. But it’ll be scary to lose this body. And we _hate_ the place we call home.”

Madeline wasn’t sure if she was trying to reassure Badeline or herself (in as much as that was a meaningful distinction) when she said, “You’ll still exist, though. You were a part of me before we came here. And we can improve the place. Make it not beige.”

Badeline nodded, still looking concerned. “Yeah, I know. But I’m going to have to depend on you to listen to me.” Her ears flicked back in an expression of outright fear. “...Even if I can’t talk to you in person anymore. I just...can’t go back to how it was before. Before the Mountain.”

Madeline raised a wing in an offer for a hug. “Don’t worry, I can’t go back to that either. I really want us to work together from now on.”

Badeline relaxed, a little, and to Madeline’s surprise took a mostly-human form again. She settled down on the ground, accepting the offered winghug and using Madeline’s side as an armrest. 

Madeline felt loved.

“I believe you. But I’m still nervous.”

Badeline buried her hand in Madeline’s feathery mane, and began gently working at the feathers, running her fingers through them in a way that felt surprisingly good. 

“So...now what?”

Madeline was so distracted by the mane petting that it took her almost ten seconds to answer, which Badeline didn’t seem to mind. “Let’s just enjoy this for a bit.”

After several minutes of enjoying the view and the affection equally (and the sense of accomplishment slightly more as she hadn’t actually felt that in _years_), Madeline remembered that she’d been trying to ask Badeline a question for some time now.

“On the topic of working together...is there anything in particular you want?”

Badeline scratched behind Madeline’s ear. She suddenly understood why her mother’s cat Samsy liked ear scratches so much.

“More kitchen supplies, food is stressful because we have to wash dishes so often. Talk to your family more, we’ve been lonely. Glitter pens because we’re still mad at Chad stealing ours when we were twelve. Posters to cover up the beige if you’re not up to repainting. Maybe some more furniture, our house is minimalism hell. And a rock collection.”

Madeline hummed happily, trying to focus more on the list than on the ear scritches; it was surprisingly difficult. Most of the list sounded very obvious. Madeline did have a few questions, though, and had expected something like “a hoard of some sort”.

“Rock collection? Why specifically rocks? No hoard of cheap jewellery or something?”

Badeline glared at her. “Collecting gold and jewels is just rich lunatic rock collecting.”

Madeline had to admit, she wasn’t wrong.


	4. like a candle makes a brighter place (Epilogue)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from Thousand Foot Krutch's So Far Gone

By the time Madeline made it back down, it was dark. The night was clear and cold enough that Madeline was in dragon form and fluffed up almost spherical for warmth. (It was very effective; despite the frost on her horns, Madeline felt toasty warm.)

Badeline had been unfused for most of the trek back down, and it had become rather uncomfortable. They had both decided it was worth it to keep talking in person, but as soon as they stopped, Badeline fused back in and Madeline’s shoulders slumped with relief.

Without the constant incomplete feeling of being unfused for a long period of time, Madeline could focus on other discomforts.

Like the fact that she’d run out of snacks not long after lunchtime, and she was _hungry_; or the fact that her feet hurt, and she had a few blisters forming on her hands.

All worth it.

Madeline stretched, then headed into the old lady’s cottage. The rush of warm air made her horns ache slightly from the temperature change, and her feathers reflexively flattened. Something smelled delicious; Madeline found herself trying to figure out what it was from smell alone, made more difficult by the fact that her senses were a little different in dragon form.

“Welcome back,” the old lady said, looking up from the game of cards she was playing with Theo. One of the cards on the table blew off onto the floor, which reminded Madeline that she needed to close the door.

Theo seemed far more excited than Madeline had expected; she suspected he’d been losing and was glad of the distraction. “Madeline! Did you make it to the summit?” he asked, impatiently. 

Badeline immediately unfused, which Madeline was a little disappointed about, but only a little. (Being fused hadn’t yet stopped being actively pleasant, but being able to talk to Badeline in person was _fantastic_.)

She smiled proudly at Theo. “Yeah, we did. It was incredible.”

The old lady grinned at her and asked, “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Madeline noticed that she seemed distracted enough being proud of her home that she’d set her cards down, which probably meant she’d decided to stop playing or something, although they were facedown so maybe not. Theo grinned and fistpumped silently. Madeline would have bet actual money he’d either been bored, or losing.

“I didn’t think it’d be worth it…” Badeline said, before breaking into a grin. “But it totally was.”

Theo managed to get the grin off his face to affect an upset look. “I should’ve given you my phone so you could take the _ultimate selfie._” Madeline didn’t tell him that she _had_ brought a camera, in the form of a heavily modified used-to-be-a-smartphone that had been a gift, or that she hadn’t even considered taking a selfie up there. His upset may have been mostly for the drama, but having seen his phone’s photo album Madeline was sure he wanted a summit picture at least a little.

“Well, I can at least take selfies with you now!” Theo said excitedly, surreptitiously sweeping the cards off the table. “Selfies with you in your true form, I mean.”

Madeline wasn’t sure that was the best idea- she wasn’t a fan of how she looked- but it _was_ Theo’s phone and his decision on what he wanted to take photos of, so she nodded in agreement.

Theo looked even more excited and almost immediately had his phone out and Madeline in a side-hug.

Her “wait, what, I’m not ready!” expression was once again immortalized on his phone.

_______________

Pie-making was something Madeline still didn’t feel up to doing in dragon form, so she took a mostly-human form for it (keeping her horns, ears, claws, and feathers in place of her hair). Her reflection followed suit, and as she finished transforming, announced that (as she hadn’t wanted Theo to use her joke name) she was now going by Pom. Madeline wondered if anyone else caught that it was just an acronym for ‘part of Madeline’, then decided that it sounded namelike enough to not matter. 

The old lady didn’t have enough large bowls for making both the pie crust and the pie filling, but Madeline had made pie crust in a pot before. Pom started off helping by preparing the strawberries while Madeline made the crust, but then she started trying to steal the ingredients and Madeline had to split her attention between baking and defending the ingredients from Pom’s attempts to find out what everything tasted like.

Theo eventually bribed her out of the kitchen with a piece of chocolate. Madeline was torn between being grateful that she didn’t have Pom getting in the way trying to eat pie crust with a spoon, and being offended that a single piece of chocolate worked as a bribe.

She was just putting the pie in the oven when Pom reappeared, this time to nibble on an eggshell. Madeline was horrified.

“Pom, no!”

Theo rushed into the kitchen, then skidded to a stop on seeing Pom with the eggshells. “Oh, it’s just eggshells. I thought she was trying to eat the pie crust again!” “It’s _eggshells_, Theo. Those aren’t food!”

Theo stared at her, looking distinctly confused. Madeline didn’t know what she’d said wrong.

“You got raised by humans, didn’t you…”

That just confused and worried Madeline more, but she shook her head. “No. Half-dragons who were raised by humans.”

Theo seemed sad. “...Madeline...dragons can safely eat eggshells. Also bones, nightshade berries, and a lot of other things that aren’t food for humans.”

“Oh.”

Pom handed the eggshell off to Madeline, who didn’t want it and was starting to suspect Pom had lied about having had enough dinner, and then wandered off. Hopefully not to raid the fridge. 

“Do you have a good source or something? There’s probably a lot of other things I don’t know, and I’d-” Madeline was interrupted by discovering what Pom was doing via the sudden secondhand taste of baking soda.

“POM WHY!”

“I had to know what it tasted like!”

“Go wash your mouth out so we can _both_ stop tasting it-with _water_ not with orange juice!”

Madeline turned back to Theo to find that he was visibly struggling not to laugh. Her distressed shrug caused him to break into actual giggles.

_____________________

Even knowing how good it _smelled_, Madeline (and everyone else) was surprised at how good the pie _tasted_. There wasn’t much left of it after everyone had taken as much as they wanted, even with Pom only taking a small slice and claiming that magical reflections didn’t need to eat much. Madeline suspected she’d actually filled up on small amounts of everything in the kitchen.

The party dissolved into pleasant chitchat. Theo had a lot of hilarious stories, the old lady was insisting people who were not Mr. Oshiro call her “Granny” and could ramble at length about the Mountain, Mr. Oshiro wanted to know how smartphones worked, and Pom mostly just watched and occasionally interjected with snark.

Over an hour in, Madeline was busy regaling everyone of a story from her work involving poorly-marked test machines, highly experimental code, and misinformed people moving the googly-eye markers around, when Theo interrupted to ask where Pom was.

A quick search revealed she was in the kitchen, mixing a tiny drink out of orange juice and hot sauce. She had the entire spice rack out, as well as what looked like every liquid she could find in both the fridge and the pantry.

As Madeline watched in baffled and concerned silence, she tried tiny amounts of orange juice with three different spice blends, maple syrup, milk, vodka, and a tiny piece of cheese. There was no taste bleedover at all; it seemed like Pom had finally figured out how to turn that off.

Madeline slowly backed out of the kitchen. “I found Pom making...culinary abominations with orange juice. Um. If you want her to _stop_ I’ll ask.”

Granny decided that she didn’t mind Pom’s kitchen experiments, so long as she didn’t have to taste them, and Madeline resumed telling the story.

She got interrupted twice by Pom appearing to give her samples of experiments that actually turned out well: some kind of hot chocolate experiment, and something involving strawberries, cheese, and hot sauce. (Madeline appreciated it, especially the hot chocolate; she had talked more that day than she usually did in a week and her throat had just been starting to hurt a bit.)

After Madeline finished her story, which everyone found hilarious, Theo started to tell a funny story of his own involving an incredibly incompetent manager. Madeline honestly thought it was a lot better than her own story. From there, the conversation, which went long enough into the night that Madeline’s eyelids felt heavy, turned to photography and Wikipedia, and from _there_ it turned into how Wikipedia was actually a decent source for reading about dragons (at least according to Theo’s dragon ex-boyfriend), and when Madeline admitted she’d been too scared about what she might find there Theo handed her his phone.

“It has data, so you can just google it,” he said.

Madeline stared at the phone, squinted, and tried zooming in. The text remained unreadably blurry, aside from the headings. For the second time on this trip, she regretted leaving her reading glasses in the car.

“Madeline?” 

“I...left my glasses in the car.” At the look on Theo’s face, Madeline hurried to explain; she wasn’t afraid like she’d normally be, but she _did_ want him to have all the information. “I didn’t realize I’d need them. Who needs reading glasses on a hiking trip if they’ve memorized all the instructions on all of their supplies! I didn’t think I’d be doing any reading and I don’t want to go out in the cold to go get them and-”

Theo reached across the table to grab her hand. “Shoosh. I was actually just going to ask if you recognized the brand of energy bars that I gave you.”

Madeline shook her head. “Nope! I was planning to ask, they’re _really_ good.”

Theo told her. 

“They sell a few different types of energy bars, if you’re going for that exact flavour you want the cricket flour ones-”

“Cricket...flour?” Madeline had the sneaking suspicion that it was exactly what it sounded like, and hoped that she was wrong. 

Theo nodded. “As in it’s made from crickets, it’s apparently really good for you.” 

Madeline flopped back and stared at the ceiling in horror. “I ate a bug. I ate bugs and _I enjoyed it._”

“You can make flour out of bugs now?” Granny said, sounding rather bemused.

“I ate. A bug.” Madeline felt distant, like this wasn’t really happening. She’d had this feeling before, but usually it did not involve existential crises over food.

“I thought you knew! It had crickets on the packaging!”

“I thought it was a logo...about making you feel so energetic you hop around like a cricket.”

“Nope, it’s crickets. Sorry?”

“_Crickets._”

Madeline distantly noticed that she was slowly sliding out of her chair.

“You don’t have to keep liking it if you don’t want to, you know,” said Granny. “But I suggest not doing...whatever you are currently doing.”

“Let me have my existential crisis in peace.”

“Where’s Pom? She might be able to help you sort out your feelings.”

Madeline by this point was more than halfway to the floor. “I don’t know…”

“I’m going to go check on her and make sure she hasn’t choked on anything,” Theo said definitively. Madeline vaguely thought that was a good idea, but she’d probably have noticed if Pom was hurt. Even despite feeling distant and far away, she _really_ wanted to know where Pom was.

She finished sliding off the chair and lay in a confused heap on the ground. It wasn’t very comfortable, but she was too busy trying to process that she had enjoyed eating bugs to care. Theo wandered off towards the kitchen.

After a couple of seconds, she heard him say, “Pom? ...Pom, are you _sleeping on the floor?_”

This was weird enough to snap Madeline out of it, a little. She still felt a little floaty, but at least she had something to focus on other than having eaten bugs. 

“Come on, let’s get you to a bed...did you actually spend the entire time we were talking just experimenting in the kitchen- oh.”

Madeline pushed herself up and went to go see what Theo was talking about. He was holding a very definitely asleep Pom (who was drooling slightly on his shirt) and looking _very_ concerned. Various kitchenware was scattered around, including a pot that was for some reason carefully balanced on an upside-down strainer.

“Did she eat something poisonous or something?” Madeline asked, trying to focus on anything but how _badly_ she wanted to be the one holding Pom instead. 

Theo shook his head. “No. She’s, uh…”

Madeline stepped forward, reached up, and started hugging Pom around the neck. She mumbled something in her sleep.

“You might want to hand Pom over to Madeline,” said Granny. “People who reconcile with their reflections tend to have a strong drive to be fused with, talking to, or touching them frequently.”

“It’s not _that_ strong,” Madeline complained with her face in Pom’s mane. She had the distinct impression that she wasn’t being believed, but ignored it. It had been several entire hours and she was going to hug her reflection, damn it.

“Madeline, her keelbone’s like the blunt edge of a knife. That’s not supposed to happen.”

Madeline had the sense that Granny was peering at her worriedly. “Do I need to start mailing you food?”

“Mhm? No.” Pom’s mane was soft and Madeline was _exhausted_; she was starting to doze off, despite her best efforts. 

“Madeline? Madeline, I can feel you leaning on me. Are you alright?”

Madeline considered moving away. Nothing happened.

“I think we also need to get _Madeline_ to a bed,” Granny said. 

Theo stepped away and Madeline almost fell over. “Yeah, yeah, I’m okay, I’m just really tired.” She rubbed at her eyes. “Also, you really don’t need to worry about me. I’m fine.”

“You don’t _seem_ fine,” said Granny concernedly. 

“I mean it!” Madeline said, annoyed. She was a little more awake now, at least. “I’m fine _now_. Really tired, it’s been a long day, but fine.”

Sighing, she stepped backwards, almost bumping into Granny. “Go put Pom on the couch, please? I’m going to get ready for bed.” 

By the time Madeline had finished getting ready for bed, she was barely able to keep her eyes open. She was headed for the gamer chair Granny owned for some reason, intending to curl up on it, but got distracted by the rug and found herself crouching down to touch it. Then, despite her best efforts, she couldn’t make herself stand back up. 

Huffing, she dropped her transformation entirely in the hopes that maybe being in dragon form would help her stand up. It did not. It did make her feel slightly too warm, and she managed to take her jacket off, which was a surprising effort. As she continued trying to stand up, she instead found herself lying on her side. 

“You alright there?” Theo asked. Madeline tried to ask him to help her up. Instead she found herself curling up on the floor. 

She tried to roll over onto her front in the hopes this would wake her up enough to stand up. Instead, she found herself putting her head under her wing and was asleep in moments.

___________________________

Madeline woke to confusion. She was in dragon form, for some reason. Her bed felt much harder than normal, and she was cuddled up to another dragon. After a little twitching, she determined she had her head under her wing, and also that her chest and wings were sore, in a “tired muscles” kind of way.

Distantly, she could hear the sounds of people doing things. Had she fallen asleep at work? No, that wasn’t possible; she was in dragon form and there was a dragon next to her. What the hell had she _up_ to last night?

After some more wriggling, during which she found out that she was sore all over rather than just having sore wings, she got her head _out_ from under her wing. Squinting against the bright light of day, she looked around and found that she was _definitely_ not in her house. 

After a few moments of confused blinking and asking herself what the hell was going on, the dragon she was cuddled up to nudged her. 

“Madeline, sweetie, when are you going to finish waking up?” Madeline wondered if she’d dropped into some other, incongruous better (for her) timeline by accident. She was cuddled up next to a dragon calling her ‘sweetie’; whatever other explanations there were, she couldn’t currently think of them.

She found herself wondering what she’d been up to last night taking into account this new information. Half a second later, she was jolted out of her thoughts and into proper wakefulness by a half-hearted wingslap. (It didn’t hurt, but it was startling.)

She was cuddled up to _part of her personified_, not somehow an alternate timeline girlfriend, and the sheer absurdity of the theory she’d had made her seriously consider pretending to go back to sleep so she could hide her head under her wing in embarrassment.

Only for a moment, though. Someone had started frying pancakes- Madeline wasn’t sure if it was Theo or Granny, but she was _pretty_ sure it wasn’t Pom using a second body- and she was suddenly aware that it was _definitely_ breakfast time. Or maybe more like brunch. Either way, she wanted pancakes and couldn’t get them if she was hiding under her own wing in embarrassment.

By the time Madeline actually made it into the kitchen, Theo was using a spatula to defend the frying pan from Pom’s attempts to add a tomato while Granny made sure the pancake didn’t burn. Madeline grabbed Pom by the shirt collar and yanked her back. “No. No tomatoes in pancakes.”

“It’s a fruit!” Pom protested.

“It’s SAVOURY and you _can’t_ just throw a whole tomato in a frying pan with a pancake!” Immediately spotting the obvious loophole, Madeline added, “Or a _chopped_ tomato, for that matter. Put the tomato _down_ and get a _sweet_ fruit if you’re making fruit pancakes.”

Theo was shaking his head and trying not to laugh. “Oh, good, you stepped in for Pom-wrangling duty. She suggested adding apple juice to the pan and making a poached pancake. Which wouldn’t be a pancake, but she didn’t care.” He paused for a moment, and looked worried. “You okay, though? You look like you’ve been crying.” 

This was news to Madeline. Pom glanced over, shrugged, and said “Crying happened when Madeline was asleep. Not a big deal.” Then she opened the fridge and Madeline had to stop her from trying to add pumpkin to a pancake. 

Over the course of the next ten minutes, Madeline dealt with Pom trying to add multiple toppings like maple syrup and cinnamon to the frying pan, stopped her from adding various liquids, and physically restrained her from trying to caramelize a lemon. 

She also stopped her from eating baking cocoa with a spoon, and insisted that if she was going to taste straight cake flour she couldn’t eat it right from the bag.

Pom also tried to make Madeline eat whatever she was trying to add to the pancakes. She accepted a drink of juice, but refused everything else, partially because she wanted pancakes and partially because she was _not eating raw lemon_. What finally worked for corralling Pom was to just grab her in a hug and refuse to let go. (Her shoulders were narrower than Madeline had expected.)

Eventually, the pancakes were ready. Madeline found herself with more pancakes than she remembered putting on her plate, not that she was complaining. (They turned out to have been Pom’s; as a magical reflection she largely sustained herself off of magic, was still feeling quite comfortable from last night, and only wanted half of a pancake.)

She did complain about the honey that Pom tried to sneak onto her pancakes, though, because it got spilt. It also got her laughed at by Granny. 

After breakfast, Pom abruptly vanished, teleporting off; she came back sheepishly a few seconds later, rifled through Madeline’s bag, left again, and returned triumphant with Madeline’s reading glasses.

Theo immediately tried to show her cat videos, all of the same cat. Madeline just wanted to read the Wikipedia article on dragons and check the time. (It turned out to be ten-thirty in the morning, which meant that Madeline had no clue what her sleep cycle looked like any more aside from “out-of-phase with the sun”. Pom didn’t know either.)

The Wikipedia article upset her in ways she wasn’t prepared for. Logically, she’d known that the constant stream of media depicting dragons as only evil, or mythical in the same sort of ways as phoenixes or pegasi, would probably have an effect on other people as well as her. It was still like a punch in the gut (from _before_ she became immune to fall damage and other forms of blunt force trauma) to see the very first paragraph mention population decline as a result of societal pressure and the words “Endangered on the IUCN Redlist”. For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, Madeline found herself feeling very, very distant, like she was only vaguely connected to her body. Her grip on the phone was white-knuckled, and Pom grabbed her shoulder hard enough to physically hurt. Eventually, she managed to get the tangled mess of upset under control enough to read the rest of the article.

The article picture was a shock in an entirely different manner. It was two _very_ good-looking (in Madeline’s opinion) dragons, one clearly showboating for the camera (with a perfectly ordinary river pebble held above their head like a trophy) and one looking vaguely annoyed at the other’s antics.

The rest of the article was less of an emotional rollercoaster, but it took until halfway through the _fascinating_ details in the biology section about how the transformation worked and some of the knock-on effects (such as some dragons being of _different sexes in each form_ and how this affected both biology and subcultures) for Pom to stop clinging to Madeline’s shoulder like an alarmed limpet as if she’d drop dead if not being held.

Theo decided to help calm her down the rest of the way by showing her an artist’s collection of pride flag dragons. It was definitely helpful in getting her mind off of that awful shock of being _on the endangered species list_, but it wasn’t so much _calming her down_ as much as making her sharply, uncomfortably aware that she was exclusively attracted to her own species. She’d forced herself into a relationship with a human before, and it had gone _terribly_. She hadn’t realized, at the time, that she hadn’t really been interested; she’d just been trying to be more human. Now, she was aware of another reason why it had gone so horribly wrong.

Theo was liveblogging her reactions to the pictures to the artist. They ranged to rambling about how the very first one on the list looked both impressive and approachable (“someone I could talk to about art, like their bodyart, without it being weird”), to declaring that she wanted to be the aunt of two of the younger-looking dragons (both wyverns like herself), to flustered incomprehensible noises and turning bright red.

Madeline didn’t really know how to process finding art of good-looking dragons. It wasn’t something she’d ever had to deal with before.

The art of them in a pride parade was almost overwhelming. One of them was doing skyart with their fire. Technically, Madeline had learnt from the wikipedia article, it wasn’t actually _fire_; rather, it was a magical effect rather like their shapeshifting, with the heat optional and ‘off’ by default and able to be shaped or even, in rare cases of unusually thorough control, made to linger in the air for up to several minutes. It explained _part_ of why she found the skyart so attention-grabbing, but only part. 

By the time Theo got to the end of the second page, Madeline had almost forgotten why she was being shown it in the first place. 

(Even the wyverns didn’t have Madeline’s three-toes-foward, two-toes-back foot structure. She was starting to suspect she was polydactyl on her feet, too, and would otherwise have a parrotlike or owllike toe arrangement. It was a strange topic to think on.)

Eventually, Madeline managed to convince Theo that she was _definitely_ sufficiently distracted, thanks, and she was _not_ interested in trawling the person’s entire dragons tag.

Madeline was trying to plan out what she’d order for dinner on the ferry in an attempt to relax _properly_ when Pom declared, “Theo. We should get each other’s phone numbers.”

The look on Theo’s face was _priceless, _and he made a bizarre garbled and vaguely alarmed noise at the statement. Pom was quick to reassure him that it was because he’d been essentially doing the big softie older brother thing with them and as far as she was concerned that meant he actually was her (unofficial, adopted) older brother now.

When she’d gone to the mountain, she hadn’t expected to gain more family. 

She had to leave entirely too soon, in her opinion, in order to catch the ferry. Even despite the Wikipedia scare and the full-body ache, it had been one of the best days she’d had in years. (The only competition it had was yesterday, when she’d summited the mountain.)


	5. we'll shine like the sun (post-epilogue)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The epilogue of this work!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from Owl City's Embers

One week later, Madeline was starting to settle into her new routine. It was still being interrupted a lot by shopping trips, new items, and doctor’s appointments; she’d gotten a new, dragon, doctor, who had been outright _surprised_ at Madeline having been up to mountain climbing in the state she was in.

She’d come to terms with liking the cricket bars, and was planning to experiment with baking with cricket flour. She’d picked out new paint for the walls with only a minor panic attack (quickly brought under control with the feather exercise) about possibly picking a different bad colour, gotten another two rocks to go along with the three she’d found on Mt. Celeste (and gotten a shelf just for them, as well as varnished them all to keep them looking their best), and brought more kitchen supplies.

The first two days back, she still was off work. She’d expected to need recovery time after the mountain climbing, but instead she felt energized, to the point where she was feeling _restless_ despite all the blisters and running around with shopping trips and changing doctors and making sure she hadn’t messed herself up too badly. 

By the time she actually had work again, she was starting to feel a familiar dull, boring emptiness. It wasn’t as _severe_ as she was used to, but she prepared herself for a pattern of a few good days at a time followed by downswings that didn’t hit the lows she’d gotten used to.

Less than an hour into her first day back, she had already discovered that actually she’d just been _bored_; her work was highly mentally demanding and within hours she was feeling much better, and also like she wanted to do very little else.

Some of her coworkers turned out to be following Theo’s instapix and word quickly got around that she was a dragon. This lead to some _very _awkward conversations, but it also led to Madeline being able to be only partially transformed or even in dragon form at work, which was very helpful. She still couldn’t comfortably stay in human form for more than a few hours, and a sudden interest in hoods and hats couldn’t cover for her forever.

(It also lead to bored coworkers stuck waiting for their code to compile changing what games they tried to rope Madeline into, if she wasn’t actively working. Madeline discovered that she liked chasing frisbees and being tossed around like a javelin.)

By the end of the week, Madeline was unpleasantly surprised to find herself completely out of her backlog of work. It probably hadn’t helped that she’d been taking it home and doing it for fun. She tried emailing her boss for more work, and upon not getting an answer in half an hour began begging extra work off her coworkers.

She was glad to get a few responses. Playing with bored coworkers just didn’t provide the same satisfying intellectual crunch as more work.

(To her surprise, over the next few days she was given over fifty recommendations for puzzle games from many different coworkers, some of whom she hadn’t talked to in months. She loved them; it gave her something to do when she ran out of work and still wanted something high-mental-effort, or when she was at home.)

After several months of her new life, Madeline felt better than she had for over a decade. She’d had a scare in spring where she’d dropped almost all her feathers in about three days, including the ‘fur’ on her wing membrane (which was actually very hairlike feathers), but after some googling and a worried doctor’s appointment it turned out to be her spring moult colliding with a cold she’d had. (She _had_ discovered that she’d been treating her feathers wrong and they needed less washing with soap and more oiling. She was surprised to discover how much better that made them look.)

Her summer coat turned out to be much less full-body fluff than her winter coat, with most of her body being scaly. She was glad- her feathers were _warm_, which would have been a problem in summer. 

She picked up new hobbies of archery and baking, signed up to a rock-climbing club, and invested in a breadmaker. Archery turned out to be very calming as a hobby; Madeline wished she’d picked it up sooner.

She’d had to buy new shirts, as all the archery and wing exercises and rock-climbing she did resulted in her building up enough upper-body muscle that they all became too tight when previously they’d all been too loose. She’d put off getting new ones, at first- partially because of sentimental reasons, and partially because she liked how it looked in dragon form, or when paired with a baggy vest. Then one of her favourite ones ripped when she stretched and she had to admit that they really didn’t fit anymore.

Theo visited over the summer, which Madeline greatly enjoyed. He even helped her work up the courage to be in dragon form outside more, including finding a dragon hangout. She was honestly surprised at how much of a relief it was to have dragon friends. 

She still had bad days. But, after everything... 

She was happy. 


End file.
